Negotiating Robustness in Semantic Web Service Composition

Automating Web service composition is a challenging area of service oriented computing, requiring progress on a number of issues concerning the automation of control flow, the alignment of data flow, verification, execution monitoring, etc. In this paper, we focus on aligning data flow in semantic Web service composition to ensure the robustness when executing the composed service by preventing any cases when the wrong type of data is passed on from one service to the next. The proposed solution is unique in that it ensures the robustness of data flow when automatically composing Web services through the use of agent-based negotiation between Web service providers. Starting from the semantic specification of a non-robust composition, we adapt the mechanism of concept abduction to compute the set of additional semantic descriptions necessary to ensure robustness of the semantic connections within the composed service. An agent-based negotiation is then used to solicit the additional semantic definitions which are required for achieving robust Web service compositions.